Designing Interfaces, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Organizing the Content: Information Architecture and Application Structure

At this point, you know what your users want out of your application or site. You’re targeting a chosen platform: the Web, the desktop, a mobile device, or some combination. You know which idiom or interface type to use—a form, an e-commerce site, an image viewer, or something else—or you may realize that you need to combine several of them. If you’re really on the ball, you’ve written down some typical scenarios that describe how people might use high-level elements of the application to accomplish their goals. You have a clear idea of what value this application adds to people’s lives.

Now what?

You could start making sketches of the interface. Many visual thinkers do that at this stage. If you’re the kind of person who likes to think visually and needs to play with sketches while working out the broad strokes of the design, go for it.

But if you’re not a visual thinker by nature (and sometimes even if you are), hold off on the interface sketches. They might lock your thinking into the first visual designs you put on paper. You need to stay flexible and creative for a little while, until you work out the overall organization of the application.

It can be helpful to think about an application in terms of its underlying data and tasks. What objects are being shown to the users? How are they categorized and ordered? What do users need to do with them? And now that you’re thinking abstractly about them, ...